THE DOGS OF ANCIENT EGYPT. 811 



abaikour, by which the hunting-dog is designated in many of the 

 Berber dialects. A servant is holding them behind the king, who 

 is looking at them, and prevents their disturbing the sacrificial 

 ceremony at which they are present. 



The shepherds had dogs of medium size with pointed ears, 

 like those which still guard the flocks of Upper Egypt. Hunters 

 sought out two or three kinds of hounds (Fig. 3), some having 

 straight ears and short tails, and some drooping ears and a long 

 tail, like the slouguis of the modern Berbers. They are to be seen 

 in many of the tombs, springing in pursuit of gazelles and ante- 

 lopes, or running down the hare and the ostrich. A few pugs, 

 heavy and grotesque like ours (Fig. 2), are represented occasion- 

 ally, rather as house-dogs than as hunters. These animals were 

 in considerable number, and made the ancient Egyptian villages 

 as dangerous at night as modern villages are. An officer relegated 

 to one of the Delta burgs a few years after the death of Rameses 

 II complained bitterly of their boldness in a letter addressed to 

 one of his chiefs : " When, sometimes," he says, " the people of the 

 country meet to drink Cilician beer and go out to open the bottles 

 there are two hundred large mastiffs and three hundred wolf- 

 dogs waiting all day at the door of my house every time I go 

 out at nightfall to take part in the feast, I am kept out if I 

 have not with me the little wolf-dog of Nahihou, the royal scribe, 

 who lodges with me. He saves me from the other dogs. At what- 

 ever time I go, he goes with me on the street ; and when he barks 

 I run, swinging my club and whips. It is, in fact, only a pack 

 of the mangy, high-tailed wolf-dogs prowling around the cattle- 

 pens. When they have made their round, the largest ones in 

 front, in a compact mass, as if in a bunch, one would say that it 

 was the enchantment of some god, a flame which had fixed itself 

 and would not let go." Roving dogs are less numerous and less 

 ferocious now, but they become at times terrible to strangers. It 

 has oftened happened to me, when casually passing through a vil- 

 lage of Upper Egypt about midnight, to be reminded when I met 

 them of the bull-dog in one of Dickens's novels, " a biter of man 

 and killer of children for sport, which usually lived on the right 

 side of the street, but also hid itself on the left side, so as to be 

 ready to jump upon the first passer-by." As it is under Tewfik 

 Pasha, so it was in the time of Rameses II, and the experience of 

 the present day enables us to understand exactly what our scribe 

 meant in the passage I have just quoted. 



The dog was a god ; he was at the same time several gods, of 

 which the best known, the barking Anubis of the Latin poets, was 

 also a jackal. As there were cemeteries for cats, there were also 

 for dogs, where their mummies are to be found by the thousand. 

 I am cognizant of them at Siout, Sheik Fadl, Feshn, Sakkarah, 



